Artists often seek a teleological end-point to the historical trends that have been doing the rounds on the global arena stitched into being through the regional biennials and triennials. However, some artists are oblivious to such artistic patterns – those that continuously seek to push the boundaries. Colours, a group of young woman artists of which Frahana Afroz, Farzana Islam, Monidipa Dasgupta, Mukti Bhowmik, Nishat Chowdhury, Rehana Yesmin, Rifat Jahan and Shaila Akhter are showcasing their works at Dwip, an artist-run gallery working to promote young talents as well as the artist groups and communities who have been struggling in the margin of the mainstream.

Among the members, Farzana Islam has been a sculptor who delves into painting exploring the same formal attributes, while Mukti Bhowmik’s small-scale sculptural pieces attempts to capture intimate human conditions applying expressionistic rigour. Manipulating design, Monidipa Dasgupata pushes things further to the virtual realm, where landscape assumes the shape of fantastic geometrical patterns.   

Farhana Afroz, in contrast, explores the formation of various abstract patterns on the surface of the paintings, yielding visual verve and compositional harmony.

Shaila Akhter’s Composition series is a unique testimony to how an artist negotiates the real showing an authentic painterly attitude, which is of course more in sync with Abstract Expressionism, where the subjective and the objective come together to create surfaces that seek transcendence.

A group usually works in collusion. With Colours too, the members have been in conversation with one another for a long time. However, each has conspired to conjure images and objects that would testify to their personal commitment to art and its individual linguistic dimension.  

— Mustafa Zaman